CRANE Report Summary

Periodic Report Summary 1 - CRANE (Community and Ramp Aircraft NoisE)

Summary:The CRANE consortium aims at leading a multidisciplinary doctoral training programme of high scientific level for young researchers to address the current and future challenges in community and ramp aircraft noise reduction by industrial take-up of innovative research findings.

Through the collaboration between an academic research institution in England, ISVR, and a private research-performing company in Belgium, Siemens, the CRANE EID project is expected to support long term industry-oriented research and to play a role in the continuous improvement of the quality of the European training programmes. The choice of Rolls-Royce, as associated partner was dictated by the need to ensure that training programs and research targets are in line with the demands of industry manufacturers in Europe. All partners have a long track record in European training networks and have already coordinated or participated in numerous successful FP6/FP7 projects.

Objectives:Reducing aircraft noise emission is a priority for the European aviation sector, since both community and occupancy noises have significant environmental impact and constrain airport activities. In addition there is a strong interplay between low noise technologies, fuel efficiency and air pollution.

Computer simulations play a crucial role in the acoustic design of aircraft airframes and engines, by selecting novel concepts, optimizing final designs, and avoiding costly flight and static tests. But current computational tools are either unable or too inefficient to perform large acoustic simulations over the complete frequency range and taking into account the full geometrical and physical complexity.

Further improvements in computational aero-acoustics requires novel numerical schemes, better integration with other engineering design tools, and also stronger alignment with the needs of private sector end-users. To achieve this, Siemens PLM and ISVR are leading this training and research program, together with Rolls-Royce and KULeuven as associated partner. The research activities covers high-order methods, novel techniques for accurate geometry description, and extensions of the Boundary Element methods. These techniques will be used for the acoustic design of nacelles and Auxiliary Power Units (APU) which feature complex geometries and flow configurations, and for predicting installation effects (acoustic interaction between the engine and the wing) which currently requires vast computational resources.

This research program is supported by a range of courses that combines the complementary expertise of the project partners (aero-acoustics, computational methods, CAD methods, aircraft noise). Such a combination of multi-disciplinary training activities is currently not available elsewhere, but is needed to develop researchers with the appropriate blend of expertise to support the future evolutions of aircraft noise predictions.

Status:Fellows have been hired and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at University of Southampton. We are proud of the perfect gender balance! They have followed a unique blend of trainings dedicated to their research and career path aspirations. Two of the ESRs have finished their initial training period in Southampton University and are now at SISW (Siemens Industry Software). Similarly, one ESR has finished his period at SISW and is now at University of Southampton.In terms of scientific progress, the 11 publications reached so far at mid terms give an hint on the good progress.